ISSUE 21
27
Strategy: Jelle Frank
How hosting providers can maximise the cloud opportunity Interxions’s Director of Business Development and Marketing for the Cloud, explains why providers who grab the cloud market now will gain a significant boost fuelled by the marketing, development and innovation budgets of the market leaders.
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Jelle Frank Jelle Frank manages the panEuropean marketing and product development programme for Interxion and has over 12 years of experience working in ICT product and business development. Prior to joining Interxion, he was responsible for product management and marketing of managed services at Imtech ICT, and was Senior Product Marketing manager at UPC, responsible for data services in the Netherlands and he began his career working in marketing management positions for KPN and Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.
he cloud markets on either side of the Atlantic are still very different. European providers know that the hype around cloud computing is often skewed towards a US perspective, so there are still many unanswered questions about how to successfully capitalise on the cloud opportunity in Europe. With so many players in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) market, rapid growth is driving fierce competition. There are two main battlegrounds: the provision of IT infrastructure services – compute, storage and network – and the delivery of value-added services such as database, security, disaster recovery and business applications. The global industry leaders – Amazon, Microsoft, Softlayer – aren’t limiting themselves to the former but are continually developing their offerings to address enterprise needs at all levels, leading to increased competition in the hosting market. The challenge for smaller providers So the challenge is to grab a slice
of the cloud pie, while avoiding an unprofitable and unwinnable price war. This issue is that cloud computing has an element of commoditisation at its heart. This puts pressure on hosting providers – especially those catering to the SMB market – to launch cloud services that enable them to differentiate themselves from the competition and justify higher margins than large-scale commoditised services can typically support. To maintain margins, many successful providers have adopted a combination of the five strategies outlined below. A geographically distributed hosting service The market for cloud services presents an opportunity for European hosting providers to expand geographically and deliver cloud services internationally. For example Swedish provider City Cloud offers its OpenStack-based public cloud in Sweden, UK and Germany. Although other providers may have nodes in more than one